What Sulzberger Wants

When Arthur Sulzberger Jr. became publisher of the New York Times in 1992, he was a young, brash 40-year-old—the paper’s heir apparent in the Ochs-Sulzberger clan, but one who pledged to reform the Grey Lady’s management and its journalism. Sulzberger’s tenure may well be the most challenging in the paper’s history, with a digital revolution, a collapsing economic model and plenty of the controversies that attend any powerful institution. Under his leadership, the Times has won 50 Pulitzers and regained some economic stability. But Sulzberger has also fired his chief executive officer and two executive editors—Jill Abramson of course being the most recent.

Sulzberger is not the man he was when he began his journey at the top of the Times. He has been in the crucible and has been shaped by that experience—some of which the late Susan E. Tifft and I chronicled in our 1999 book, The Trust, which is excerpted below. To see Sulzberger clearly now—to understand his leadership of America’s leading newspaper—it may be helpful to see who he was when he first started. —Alex S. Jones

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The mood was uncomfortable in the conference room as Doug Wesley, a management consultant and professional “facilitator,” tried to goad senior editors and a smattering of lower-level department heads into speaking freely about the climate of fear that permeated the Times newsroom. Arrayed around a horseshoe-shaped Formica table, the 20 men and women were gathered in early December 1992 for a two-day retreat at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Greenwich, Connecticut, at the request of the new publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., to draft a “mission statement” for the New York Times and to talk about the need for change at the paper.

When no one made a move to speak, Wesley got specific. He wanted to discuss the page-one conference—the meeting executive editor Max Frankel held every afternoon to discuss which stories would appear on the next day’s front page. Despite Frankel’s expressed desire to encourage “good fun” in the Times newsroom, the sessions had come to resemble the movie The Paper Chase, with Frankel taking the part of Professor Kingsfield as the humiliating Socratic inquisitor, and managing editor Joe Lelyveld playing his terrifying teaching assistant. There were days when editors couldn’t get a full sentence out before Frankel or Lelyveld jumped on them, shooting holes in their logic or eviscerating the story as they had proposed it.

Finally national editor Soma Golden Behr broke the ice. She had worked for Frankel as a member of the editorial board and remembered the discussions then as collegial and Frankel as “relaxed” and “never snappy, never arrogant.” What was it about the job of executive editor, she wondered aloud, that now made him such an intellectual bully? “I think of the page-one meeting as a colloquy,” Frankel responded, mystified that the gathering would be considered anything but a comradely conversation. “I’ve been in a lot of page-one meetings,” Arthur Jr. shot back, “and the one thing I can tell you, Max, is that it ain’t no colloquy!” The room fell silent.

Prior to the retreat, Frankel and Wesley had met for lunch, at which Wesley had told him the meeting was going to focus on creating a mission statement that would express the “core values” of the New York Times. The business side of the paper had already drafted its own version several months earlier; Greenwich was to be the newsroom’s chance to revise the language before the two sides met to hammer out a final document. Instead of a constitutional convention, however, Greenwich had turned into a scathing critique of Frankel’s management. He felt betrayed and mistreated, and finally he turned directly on Wesley. “You were dishonest with me,” he said. “You told me this meeting was going to be about one thing, but it’s all about how I manage. You set me up.” As the group broke for lunch, the ashen-faced Frankel told the editor seated next to him, “I don’t feel welcome here anymore. If they want me to go, this is a lousy way to tell me.”

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When the group reassembled in the afternoon, it was Arthur Jr., not Wesley, who assumed the role of moderator. He opened the session by apologizing to his staff; he had never intended for the meeting to devolve into an assault on the executive editor. He admired both Frankel and Lelyveld, he said, and had confidence in them as journalists. He just wanted them to be more democratic, less command-and-control. In the well-chosen phrases that characterized all his public speech, Frankel diplomatically replied that he felt fealty to the Sulzberger family and commitment to the changes Arthur Jr. had embraced. At the same time, he expressed irritation at the notion that any psychobabbling business consultant could presume to tell the Times newsroom how to improve. “We can do that ourselves,” he said. The exchange caused editors and department heads to recoil in embarrassment. Harsh page-one meetings aside, Frankel had turned the cowed newsroom of Abe Rosenthal into a more humane place to work. Why, then, had Arthur Jr. allowed his top editor to be so singled out for abuse that these awkward public declarations were necessary?

Creating a new statement of purpose, like the retreat itself, had been Arthur Jr.’s brainchild. Adolph Ochs’s stirring pledge to “give the news impartially, without fear or favor” had served the New York Times well for nearly 100 years, and none of the succeeding publishers—Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Orvil Dryfoos and Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, Arthur Jr.’s father—had had any inclination to change it. But it was Arthur Jr.’s view that the vow was disturbingly vague and not broad enough for a polyglot population. “As you become more diverse, you’ve got to be clearer about what it is you’re trying to say, because the words mean different things to different people,” he insisted. He also had another goal: to use the mission statement as a vehicle to “get the senior [news and business] management of this newspaper to come to grips with some of the fundamental issues that had been dividing them.” He had watched his father play the role of court of last resort at the paper; he didn’t want to spend the next 20 years of his life refereeing every conflict that came along between the newsroom and the business departments.